For Want of a Nail
by quaros
Summary: On a mission two years after Revenge of the Sith, Vader decides to spare the lives of two boys, changing the fate and destiny of the galaxy in the years after that.
1. Prologue

Disclaimer: Sadly, I don't own _Star Wars._ That honor belongs to Disney and Lucasfilm.

* * *

 _For want of a nail the shoe was lost._

 _For want of a shoe the horse was lost._

 _For want of a horse the rider was lost._

 _For want of a rider the message was lost._

 _For want of a message the battle was lost._

 _For want of a battle the kingdom was lost._

 _And all for the want of a horseshoe nail._

 **Prologue (Circa 17 BBY)**

 _A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…_

Transparisteel was a sturdy material, all things considered. One which, though weaker than durasteel, held its own against many things, like blasters or the stress of spaceflight. However, neither a few rounds from a blaster nor the exit of the stratosphere possessed the raw, unlimited power that the force did. Controlled, harnessed fury shattered the windows of the building and, as if a gale had appeared out of nowhere on a relatively calm day, threw Dan Halamn out of where a window had once been just a few seconds prior and onto the grass below. The black figure that had chased him to the second floor of the building simply leapt 15 feet to the ground as if it was nothing. Which it, in actuality, wasn't; not for a Lord of the Sith anyway.

As the black figure advanced towards his sorry state, Dan tried to move in some way or another. Summoning all his strength, he attempted to push himself off the floor and get up, only to find one of his legs with a bone sticking out of it. It was at around this point, with the black figure and its loud breathing device towering over him, that he realised he was going to die.

At least, he thought, he would try and look this _thing_ in the eye. If it had one, for the black 'eyes' of the mask stared at him with a fury that the grille-like mouth only served to compliment. Looking at his assailant now, he felt fear he had never felt before. A fear that made him cold with dread, and even, in a twisted way, quelled the pain he felt moments before. After what felt like hours but probably was only a few seconds, the huge, towering figure spoke, with a deep, bass-filled tone coming out of its vocabulator.

"Do not think, Halamn, you can die a death with valour after living the life of slime. Your actions warranted your ending. A pitiful pathetic man, ending his life on a pitiful pathetic world, with nobody to even care to attend the funeral."

The shock and horror of his situation never even got a chance to make its way to be processed in full by Halamn's brain. A crimson blade ignited and sliced through what had been Dan Halamn merely seconds before. The movement was so quick and perfect that few would have seen it, for as soon as it was over, the blade retracted back into the cylinder which held it. An artistic execution, perhaps if there ever was one. That was it. He was gone.

The black-armoured being, which had assumed the role of judge, jury and executioner, walked away without as much as a brief glance at the corpse. _It would rot away,_ he surmised, _and no one would care to come for him._ His relief in finishing his task and his walk back to his shuttle, which was a not considerable distance away, was startled by a noise. Turning around, he saw two small boys of the ages of no more than five or so (though he suspected the smaller, black haired boy was less than three) stood over the body.

"Daddy" cried out the slightly larger, blond haired boy in distress. "Daddy, wake up!"

The boy prodded and kept prodding at Halamn's fallen body for a good minute or so before the other boy turned and stared directly at the black-armoured being. Being three years old, he did not have the greatest gasp of galactic basic, but the message was clear: he knew the name of the person who had killed 'Daddy'. "Darth Vader" he said, "Bade, it Darth Vader". Bade, the elder of the two boys, got up from his sunken state and moved so that he could look at Vader directly himself. It would, unbeknownst to him, most likely be the last thing he ever saw.

Vader, though a man with very little moral boundaries left to cross, did not regard the inevitable murder of infants as something which brought him much pleasure, even as a Sith lord. Yes, he had killed children in the past, but only in two situations. The first was, as an angry, revenge-driven youth of about 20, he had massacred a tribe of Tusken Raiders. However, the key term there was "angry". He had lost his mother to that tribe, and had regretted his actions afterward. The second time was three years after that, when he had, after finally shedding his identity as Anakin Skywalker and becoming Darth Vader, led the assault on the Jedi Temple. Under orders from his master, he had (or, he and the help of a legion of clones had) killed all those who resided within it, including the younglings. He had however justified this by rationalising in his mind that he was acting under orders, and the end justified his means.

Whilst thinking over this subject, Vader realised there was a third time he had killed an infant, albeit not directly. It had happened nearly two years ago, but it was the worst of the three moments. The one day of his life he wished he could change everything about. When _she_ had come to him on Mustafar, despite him telling her to not do so. When _she_ had begged him to leave everything he had done for her and just run away with her into nowhere. When _she_ rejected him asking to rule the galaxy with him, telling him that he had gone down a path that was impossible to follow. When _she_ had taken his traitorous former master with her in her ship and brought him there to kill him.

When _he_ hadn't listened to her pleas or to her desperate cries and her proclamations she loved him. When _he_ had choked her and killed her, and consequentially, the child that resided within her womb. When _he_ , after being crippled, maimed, and left to burn by a man he had considered his brother for most of his life, had been put in this wretched suit and become nothing more than a lackey, a plush lapdog. When _he_ had done everything to save her and it hadn't been enough. When _he_ had lost the only person who ever loved him or cared for him based on who he really was, not what they wanted him to be.

He didn't know what it was, but undoubtedly thinking of _her_ might have just been what made him deactivate his lightsaber and tell the boys to come with him. He didn't even register killing the officer standing guard at the entrance to his shuttle so as to keep the boys' existence a secret. His master would conclude that he had gone weak, had found surrogate children in place of the one he had lost, and was not worthy of his servitude towards his master.

It turned out to be the wise decision. Vader had not seemed to have noted beforehand, but reaching out towards them, he felt both boys' strong force presence. _Why,_ he wondered, _had Halamn not given them to the Jedi when the order was still around_? Expanding on his thought, he concluded that Halamn had worked as a criminal during a galaxy-wide conflict, and his two children would have therefore simply slipped under the Jedi's radar. Though he was sceptical, after Mustafar, of midichlorian counts and their relevance to one's abilities with the force, both boys had high counts. Not, he noted, as high as his (he took some pride in this fact), but far higher than the average Jedi.

What would he do with them? That was a question he could not answer. They were too powerful to simply be paraded around; the Emperor, though far too overconfident for his own good, was not a fool. Any force-sensitive child was likely to be killed, or at best, taken in and be made little more than a slave. So, it seemed, there was only really one decision. He would train the two boys as apprentices of his. Yes, he had been given the task of training the Inquisitorious, but they were limited in terms of their ability. These boys had potential which exceeded far and above any half-decent Jedi who had given up the flawed ideals of their order and turned to the dark side. Eventually, one would kill the other and the one who did would be powerful enough to be used as a tool by him to overthrow Emperor Palpatine, and place the Empire in Vader's hands. Nothing would stand in his way now but time and patience.

Little did Vader know, but his decision to take the two sons of Dan Halamn with him would have a greater impact on galactic history than he dreamed of.

* * *

 **A.N:** The premise of this is inspired by _The Force Unleashed,_ but the rest is very different - you'll have to wait and see. Also, bits of both the new canon (Inquisitors, The Knights of Ren) and the old (Emperors Hands) will be referenced in this. But maybe the old canon will become the new canon.


	2. 18 Years Later

**18 Years Later**

Bade Halamn finished his meditation session and opened his eyes. Staring at the mirror provided in his quarters, he looked into his reflection for quite some time. He wasn't sure what he expected to see whenever he looked at himself, but he always felt a sense of disappointment. Whatever it was he thought he ought to have had, he evidently lacked. He looked at himself for quite some time and was surprised himself by how scarred his body was from his last assignment. _This was no life,_ he thought, _for a man of 22_ (though to celebrate a birthday would be an asinine idea) _to live._ His hot rage at allowing himself to be injured and feel pain cooled out into a more harnessed and controlled anger. Once, he'd been afraid of pain. He'd feared failing his master and he'd feared the white-hot touch of his master's lightsaber on his back after he'd failed. He'd hated his master's constant reminders that when the time came to duel the Emperor, there would be no room for a false move, no room for a slip-up. It made him stronger. But it came at a cost: his humanity.

Though it had been many years since his master had last harmed him like that, he'd feared his master's wrath after this assignment; because for once he had failed. He never failed. He never failed his master, and by extension the Empire which his master was second-in-command of. Failure, for him, was not an option. But yet he had. He'd been deceived by a simple ruse from a band of pathetic terrorists who clung to ideals of a failed political system. He'd tracked their little group and their Alderanian corvette all the way to Saleucami in the Suolriep sector, only to find when he'd finally caught up with it that it had turned out to be abandoned and he'd been led on the greatest wild Bantha chase known to anyone. A ruse he could deal with, but losing track of the stolen technical readout of the DS-1 orbital battle station (or the _Death Star,_ as it was known) he probably could not. To cap the whole sorry affair off, his actions had led to the destruction of the Death Star. Some lucky pilot had taken a shot with a snub fighter and actually managed to destroy the damn thing. Nobody out of the hundreds of thousands of officers and crew bar his master and General Tagge had survived, and it was no thanks to him.

While he could make plenty of protestations at the ineptitude of the design and Imperial starfighter pilots, as well as Moff Tarkin's pathetic bravado which led to his not untimely demise, it was unlikely his master would listen to him when he next saw him. The next time he saw him, he surmised, he would be lucky to escape with his life. Lord Vader did not tolerate failure. If the force worked in mysterious ways, Bade Halamn was certain it didn't work in mysterious ways which were beneficial to him.

However, his fears turned out to be largely unfounded. The next time he did see his master after being summoned alongside his brother to his quarters at his master's residence, what greeted him was a very different sight to what he had been expecting. Though he knew his master suffered some sort of health problem which had resulted in the suit, he had never seen him quite as vulnerable as he had in that moment. Clearly, he was not the only person who answered to someone else and it showed.

Whatever the Emperor's opinion on the Death Star's destruction was, it had not been kind in his punishment to Darth Vader. His body, already broken, deformed and left in a badly made suit, had been further tortured by the Emperor's lighting. His circuitry had failed on him, and had it not been for his incredible power, he would most likely have died from this. Lesser men, including the designer of the damn Death Star, had done so. _Suffering births insight_ , Vader had thought once, but the only insight he could find from this was to not fail the Emperor again. All of this because he had failed to press the trigger button quickly enough and not sensed another ship coming in from behind to blast him off course. _No matter,_ he thought, _whatever pilot lucky enough to take that shot will find it runs out soon enough up in space, and he'll die just as soon as his heroic status was born._ He hadn't even felt satisfaction in the one thing he had expected to gain closure from: the death of Kenobi. Though he had not expected any sort of battle like the one they had fought on Mustafar, he had expected the old man to give more fight than just some half-hearted blocks and some rather pointless attempt at witty banter. Had Kenobi and himself not been Jedi and Sith respectively, one would've thought they were old friends having a casual conversation, albeit within a lightsaber duel. When he'd killed the man he hadn't even gained the pleasure of having a corpse to gloat over, Kenobi had simply vanished. To make it more irritating, any gloating that could've been possible over some robes was ended prematurely by the boy travelling with Kenobi firing wildly in anger at him. Though perhaps Kenobi had never intended to survive, and finding the boy was the key to whatever the old man was doing on Tatooine. Why any boy younger than the Empire would've been foolish enough to go along with the man, he didn't know. But he would certainly uncover all of this before too long.

Finding the two Halaamn brothers he had summoned for present but staring at him in thought within his hyperbaric chamber, he departed from this train of thought and brought his attentiveness back to them. After a momentary pause, he spoke at them.

"This is what has happened to me as a result of failure. I am too weak to think of any suitable punishment for you, Bade, but rest assured I won't be if anything like this happens again."

Vader's words had the cutting impact they had needed, and Bade flinched at the implication of what exactly would happen to him if he was to fail his master.

"Whoever the pilot that destroyed the Death Star was, he will be held accountable for his crimes. But to do so, I must find out his name. His death must be achieved in a way so as to not allow him to become a martyr for the Rebellion."

A smile began to etch itself across the face of Jon, the younger of the two brothers. As he turned and walked away, his strong footsteps making a distinctive slapping sound on the polished, sleek surfaces of Vader's rooms Bade found an unusually dark, chilling aura creep into his senses. A sense of precognitive dread he had not encountered for so long. Yet whatever had been the cause of the feeling died away as soon as it had been felt, and left him with nothing but to ponder the source of this tremor in the force. Disturbed and unnerved, he bid his master farewell and left abruptly, not bothering to ask if Vader had felt the same thing.

Walking down the corridors which led him from Vader's chambers to the hanger of Bast Castle, he was so engrossed in his own thoughts that he walked straight into another man, causing the man to nearly drop his own datapad (which he himself had admittedly been engrossed in) onto the floor. Fortunately, when Bade looked up at the figure to apologise awkwardly it turned out to be someone he personally recognised.

The man in question was Commander Praxas, a slightly shorter than average but stocky Corellian man of a few years older. The "Commander" rank was however a misnomer, for Praxas had left the conventional Imperial military as soon as his first assignment had been completed and his reports had been seen by the supreme commander of Death Squadron himself. These days, he worked for Vader more or less directly in a manner of roles. One of which (unfortunately for Praxas) was that whilst unassigned but on duty he amounted to little more than a valet. With Vader being a very uncomplicated man to cater for, Praxas had found that his itinerary during Vader's "leave" amounted to little than pacing up and down the halls, staring at the acid rains of Vjun, reading field reports and eating three meals a day, with some light draining. He longed for the thrill of the chase, not to be a domestic servant.

Unbeknownst to him, Bade Halamn was his escape route from this mind numbing boredom. It had been 8 months since he'd last gone on a mission, and by now he wasn't even bothered what the assignment was, as long as it got him away from a world where the climate was so bad that the safest option for any visitor was to be stuck inside a house with an injured and angered Lord of the Sith. Which was just as well, because this would turn out to be Praxas's last.

* * *

The empty, vast expanses of the vacuum many called space lay dormant. Then seemingly from out of nowhere, an Imperial _Lambda-_ class shuttle dropped out from the depths of hyperspace and its engines moved to their sublight capacities. The _Lambda-_ class T4a shuttle had been designed by Sienar systems for the purpose of transporting dignitaries, such as Moffs, Generals and even the Emperor or Vader themselves. With two forward mounting double laser cannons and two wing-mounted double laser cannons, as well as a rear facing cannon, it was also able to engage any substantial security threat which it may face. Sat at the controls of the ship, Praxas was counting on this to be the case. Though Praxas himself was certain the Rebels' old base on the fourth moon of Yavin had been cleared and routed out by Vader's troops not long after his full recovery, Halamn had been insistent that the answer lay on the jungle moon.

As they followed the orbit that the Death Star had taken on its fated journey to its destruction, Halamn felt what he could only describe as echoes through the force. It was as if the debris from the battle station, which had by all accounts spectacularly imploded and left nothing physical behind, had been left in a mental rather than physical manifestation. Here he was, at what had proven to be the graveyard for hundreds of thousands of men, and yet there was and would never be a sign of the bodies. Though the shuttle had a strong sensor array, all that was detected within the rather large detection vicinity was the existence of various moons of the gas giant Yavin and a sole Imperial satellite, which was neither here nor there in terms of its existence in the eyes of either man. Halamn continued musing. In a reflective mood, neither he nor Praxas noticed the small blip which appeared momentarily on their sensors, before it cloaked itself away from any scanner of Imperial usage. The shuttle continued its orbit of the gas giant, and as they approached the moon, Halamn ran his hand over his lightsaber, out of perhaps. Just as he was about to check the cargo hold, which he had avoided for its stench of perspiration, he felt a premonition through the force.

Suddenly, a burst of green plasma fire zoomed past the cockpit window, and a TIE fighter roared, following it. Confused by this action, Halamn was about to order Praxas to follow the fighter when it looped around and flew so it was facing straight on at the shuttle. Had Praxas been a man with lesser reaction speeds, he, Halamn and the shuttle would have certainly perished above the moon, with their remains being first frozen by the 2.7 degree Kelvin temperature of the vacuum of space, and then burned up by the searing heat of atmospheric re-entry. Fortunately, Praxas managed to shift the shuttle out of the way of the laser fire's trajectory just at the last possible second. Concerned by the lack of manoeuvrability and the disadvantage in terms of speed compared to the TIE, Praxas made the decision to goad the fighter into atmospheric combat, where the ability to bail out of the shuttle meant that they would be far less likely to die, and also far more likely to score a hit on a fighter which was built for space combat.

Entering the atmosphere, Praxas found himself going to almost impossible lengths to prevent the TIE from scoring a hit on him. Moving to his right, he instructed Halamn to take control of the weapons systems. As they descended from space through the stratosphere, the TIE approached for another round of fire. Halamn found himself suddenly in range, and firing incessantly, he sent twin beams of plasma in the direction of the tie. The red lasers emitted from the side cannon hit the left wing of the TIE fighter, leading for smoke to billow out of the wing as the signature roar of the Ion engines it utilised was replaced by the sound of failed engines as the pilot struggled to keep control of the craft. Halamn himself would've celebrated the success had the TIE itself not fired at precisely the same time. The TIE's weapons also scored a direct hit, and resultantly the shuttle buckled and rocked under the strain that the damage had caused them. The blue light emitted from the engines jolted on and off repeatedly for a number of seconds, before finally putting out. The shuttle stalled and descended thousands of feet in a matter of seconds, before finally reaching its terminal velocity as it headed toward the jungle. If Praxas had been asked what his final thoughts would be in his life beforehand, one could safely assume that s _tang, I really could've banked to port when I had the chance to_ wasn't what he wanted to be the case.

The shuttle hit the tall trees of the jungle of Yavin IV with impact. Though it had nothing flammable left to allow it to explode, the sheer physics of a large tree impacting head on with the front window of the cockpit which was travelling at terminal velocity could not be discounted for. In the final moments before impact, however, Bade Halamn had managed to cut through the bottom of the shuttle with his lightsaber and jumped out, knowing fully well Praxas would not be able to do so with him. Too late to deploy his parachute, he fell around thirty feet before, in a stroke of unfathomable luck, he fell through a small clearing and onto the jungle floor. Exhausted by his efforts to save himself and considerable use of the force, he passed out and succumbed to a black void of nothingness, oblivious to the figure watching from around thirty feet behind his unconscious self.


End file.
